Our evolutionary system has left us with deep needs that we constantly strive to satisfy in order to help spread our genes. A simple trilogy that Straker and Rawlinson (2002) derive from Maslow and evolutionary needs, and which is very relevant to questions of brand, is the need for a sense of control, the need for a sense of identity and the need for novelty.
The need for control is closely allied to survival and is supported by the need to predict, for which brands have great relevance. Brand promises are short cuts to trust, which enables prediction. If you break a promise, you are hitting at deep needs, which naturally will cause a strong reaction! The need for identity is again significant, particularly in the alignment of brand factors such as ‘personality’ with the sense of identity of its target
population. Identity formation happens at the individual level, within groups and within entire companies, with each level of identity affecting all others. These collective identities then effectively become the brand of the company, as brand decisions and the brand-as-enacted reflect the subconscious and conscious beliefs and biases of the driving members of the company. As an example, The HP Way, now very sadly ‘retired’, was Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard’s contribution to one of the best-known management philosophies for a corporate brand. We must all be aware of how fragile our core values can be and how quickly they can change and mutate into those provided by new owners.
The need for novelty drives even the most fulfilled person to keep changing and trying new things. This is both a big lever for brands and a warning never to be complacent about captive markets. The attraction of the new must be used to ensure we keep our brands fresh and stimulating, whilst of course also maintaining the control of a stable core.
Much of what we do is to satisfy our deep needs, although we often do not realize this. If brands, and those responsible for managing them, lack the depth to reach for alignment with these very real drivers of our behaviour, then those brands are effectively disconnected and drifting beyond the people they seek to influence.
Values
To live in tribes, teams and companies, we create and abide by social rules that tell us what is right and wrong, good and bad, important and less important. We then use these rules as judge and jury on one another and ourselves. We will also judge brands (after all, what else are these but ‘tribes’?), and reward or punish them accordingly.
One of the greatest crimes a brand can commit is to break a value – and not just a brand value but also a value held by the customers and other stakeholders who judge it. The most common, expected value is for truth and honesty, yet so many companies tell endless lies to their people, share- holders, customers and other stakeholders. Where the values of its execu- tives to ‘make money’ and satisfy shareholders are in conflict with the values of other stakeholders for truth, then a devastating collision is on the cards, as in the previously mentioned Enron, WorldCom, Andersen and other debacles.
One of the simplest and most powerful values that a company can have is only to promise what they know they can deliver. Yet the desperation to meet targets and to satisfy customers leads salespeople and executives to make blind promises whilst leaving the delivery of these commitments to back-room people who may not have the time, resource, skills or process sophistication to have any real chance of reliable completion.
Measurement
Perhaps this is the point where we should take a brief look at one of the other absolutely critical components of successful business and therefore, by extension, a successful society, we would hope – measurement. Measurement is so misunderstood and badly used. The capability of an organization to deliver on and manage current and desired brand percep- tions to all stakeholder groups depends on people, processes, resources and channels. Without an integrated measurement system and without a dashboard for our brand performance, it is absolutely guaranteed that no organization will be operating at optimum performance as there will be inbuilt conflicts across the organization. There are just three main reasons to measure:
ᔡ for understanding (to discover and decide); ᔡ to create the right behaviour;
ᔡ to manage gaps.
With such an understanding, companies can ensure that they build an organization that understands what it is there to do, and is structured and aligned in order to be able to do it – they can therefore deliver at least what they promise their stakeholders.
As Peter Fisk (2000) noted, company values and brand values should be congruent and relevant, and have the necessary depth and reach to create effective behaviours and experiences. Trust, once broken, is at risk of never again being repaired and, whilst a partner may allow room to repair a broken trust, you can be sure that, for your business, your customer/stake- holder group will not be half as forgiving (see Chris Macrae’s work at www.valuetrue.com). See Figure 9.1.
Breaking of values and trust leads to a sense of betrayal in which our desires for reparative and retributive justice sometimes lead us to extreme acts of revenge. Just consider the hope of 1990s investors, and their terrible 150 I Beyond Branding
punishment in the plunging markets of the early 21st century. Betrayal is one of the most powerful ways there is of changing the brand. ‘Enron’ now stands for greed, fat cats and outrageous deception – a sickening that has also tainted many other corporates.
Ethics, values and behaviours have to be congruent between all parties to give any relationship any real chance of success. The Russians and Germans attempted to collaborate early in the Second World War, but their divergent idealisms fated this marriage to a short-lived honeymoon before the inevitable divorce.
Emotion
Emotions motivate us, and it is no accident that both words derive from the same Greek roots. We feel love, interest, surprise, fear and hate, based largely around the meaning we infer from our experiences and thoughts. In fact, emotion is singly the most powerful motivational force known to humans – the expression ‘crime of passion’ exists for a very good reason! Emotion appears from the subconscious mind and it is absolutely the real reason why brands exist, and will always do so. Even in what was believed to be the totally ‘emotion-free zone’ of purchasers of technology products, in 1997 Interbrand-Schekter in New York published results of a large survey (2,500 respondents) that surprised many. It indicated that the key
Child Parent Partner Best friend Relatives ??? Recommended by those higher up the pyramid
Estate agent, car sales, timeshare salesperson ‘Convince me’ Measured belief Total belief
Understand human behaviours vs trust
Long- time brand –
never lets you down Long-time brand – occasional failure but
immediately fixed Recommended by people +
other brands (eg extension) higher up the pyramid Completely unknown – first
experience
purchase driver of such products was not price or functionality, both of which had taken turns at being the marketers’ arrowhead, but was in fact ‘the emotional attributes associated with the brand’. The last few years have seen a significant shift in the way marketing inside technology companies has developed brand positioning and messages (think Orange, think Sony, think Intel). Brands do exist in the mind, but it is fool’s gold to believe that they act anywhere else than in the heart.
In fact, emotion is at the heart of all companies, and drives people forward together, as Robert Jones (2001) identified when he noted how an idea that creates unity of feeling leads to successful companies. Recent work on such approaches as ‘emotional intelligence’ has legitimized emotion in what has often been an emotionally sterile (at least in conver- sation) workplace, and we have to manage the fact that emotion appears from the subconscious mind and it is absolutely the real reason why brands exist, and will always do so.
Such powerful subconscious drivers that force us into action may seem like a brand manager’s heaven, which, if we understand these anthropo- logical blueprints, they certainly are. It is also a heaven for alarmist jour- nalists, from Vance Packard (1957) to Naomi Klein (2000). The key is about values, ethics and responsibility. Harmful manipulation is clearly wrong, yet persuading people to buy products is as old as the town marketplace.